From the time he first started writing in 1986 and until now (2017), Choi Ihn Suk is a writer who is a significant figure in Korean Realism. At times with the eyes of Charles Dickens who sharply dissects the backstreets of London as if with a scalpel, at time with the methods of Gabriel Garcia Marquez who actively uses fantasy and nightmare, Choi Ihn Suk is recreating a place of desire called Korea. Choi Ihn Suk was a playwright and a screenwriter at the beginning, but he felt limited within the domain of the performing arts which was not free from censorship. So began writing fiction. Choi Ihn Suk says the following. “At the time, there was censorship. If you finished writing a script, you had to submit it to the Performing Arts Committee before putting on the show. Then the committee would read the script. They’d cross out certain sections with red lines, demanding an edit, and in the worst case the show couldn’t happen. You could only put up a show once you passed through censorship. Fiction or poetry would get censored afterwards, but performances would get censored beforehand. Due to such conditions of the time, it was difficult to write a script and put up a play. So I began writing fiction.”
As a writer who began writing fiction to find literary freedom, Choi Ihn Suk is a writer who expands his literary scope by repeated change. Gangcheolmujigae (강철무지개 Iron Rainbow), a novel published in 2015, is a science fiction story about Korea after 2100. In Gangcheolmujigae (강철무지개 Iron Rainbow), the value of labor in Korea has fallen, and nuclear waste has been spilled over the Yellow Sea, turning it into a sea of death. Society is controlled by a totalitarian regime, and other than the fact that there has been reunification, it is a place of darkness. Upon such imagination of science fiction, Choi Ihn Suk throw a question of realism regarding reality.
1. Life
Choi Ihn Suk was born on September 17th 1953, in Namwon Jeollabukdoas as a second son among 2 sons and 4 daughters. His father was a reporter at a regional newspaper, and was also an editorialist. Later, he spent his life as a student in Jeonju and Seoul. His literary dreams began during his high school years, and argued with his parents on whether he should go into the arts or the sciences. He went to university in 1972, but unlike his expectations, he didn’t learn much from studying Korean literature.
As a writer, he wrote plays first. In 1977, he submitted a play to a new writer’s contest, and that led to him participating in a ‘Playwriting Workshop’ taught by Yeo Seok-ki, a professor of English literature at Korea University at the time. He wrote a play “Byeokgwa chang” (벽과 창 The Wall and the Window) in this workshop, and that play won the Monthly Korean Literature New Writer’s Award in 1980, launching his literary career. Afterwards, he put up various plays on the stage, actively pursuing his career as a playwright. With “Eotteon saramdo sarajiji anneunda” (어떤 사람도 사라지지 않는다 No One Disappears), he won the Baeksang Arts Awards New Writer’s Award in 1983, and the Yeonghui Play Award in 1985. In the same year he won the Korean Literature Prize New Writer’s Award with “Geu Chanlanhadeon yeoreumeul wihayeo” (그 찬란하던 여름을 위하여 For That Shining Summer). In 1988 he won the Grand Bell Award in Dramatization for “Chilsu and Mansu” (칠수와 만수), showing his talent in various areas.
His start as a fiction writer began in 1986, when his novel Gugyeongkkun (구경꾼 The Onlooker) won the Novelists’ Award. He was writing fiction along with playwrighting, and from time to time he also translated, but he then focused on writing fiction, which became his main profession. Until now he has written many collections and novels. Through these works, he has passed through the 1980s that were fired up with furious resistance against the savage reality, the 1990s, which was a time of the inner minds and desires of individuals, and the 2000s, where new liberalism brought on the far limits of pariah capitalism. Having withstood the harsh times with writing fiction, his literary scope flows with such times, but as much as he has stood by for so long, his views on world and humanity has become deeper, and more original. Particularly, in Nae yeonghonui oomul (내 영혼의 우물 The Well of My Soul), the fantasy world that was in the novel was praised by the literary community as searching for a new method of depicting a changed reality, also influence many writers later. With his collection Nae yeonghonui oomul (내 영혼의 우물 The Well of My Soul) he won the 3rd Daesan Literary Award in 1995. He won the 8th Park Young-joon Literary Prize in 1997 with his novella Norae-e gwanhayeo (노래에 관하여 About Singing), and he won the 8th Hahn Moo-Sook Literary Prize in 2003 with his collection Gureongideului jib (구렁이들의 집 The House of Serpents).
2. Writing
Literary critic Hwang Jong-yeon has pointed to the characters that Choi Ihn Suk has carefully reproduced through his fiction, and state that they “are a type of people who promoted political radicalism”, and that they “possess social identity that coincides with those who are considered as people that had predominated literature in the 70s and the 80s”. Hwang Jong-yeon has further said the following on the characters and the places that are featured in Choi Ihn Suk’s fiction. “The people Choi Ihn Suk depicts in his fiction are those that have broke off or have been cast out from the established order. They are those for whom it is impossible to lead a life like a normal person, such as a criminal serving a sentence in a prison, a laborer working on construction sites, and the poor in a red-light district that have become morally corrupted. Moreover, his fiction often limits itself to a certain place, where the surrounding characters can fully use their advantages. Isolated places like prisons, detention camps, brothels, construction sites, orphanages, the military, and remote villages form quite dramatic environments where common sense and ideas on life are overlooked, and certain terrible truths regarding humanity are revealed.” However, the fiction that Choi Ihn Suk is writing has a big difference from the popular realism of the 1980s. Choi Ihn Suk’s characters are not noble people placed within a myth of identity that realists had explained as those that lead historical progress. Rather, they are living within extreme situations with pitiful conditions. They are beasts, similar to the ‘wolves’ that Hobbes had pointed out. Choi Ihn Suk’s story of human beasts unfolding within an extreme environment is a constant focus on the reality of our times.
The fact that Choi Ihn Suk understands the reality of our times as ‘hell’, is very useful in examining his literary scope, and considering the aspect of how his literature changes through the times. This is because ‘hell’ is a comparison with the real world made by people who are sighing in groans of agony. In other words, it’s a place made by the dismal imagination of humanity. Therefore, the drive behind Choi Ihn Suk’s ability to depict our world in sometimes fantastic (Areumdaun na-ui Gwisin (아름다운 나의 鬼神 My Beautiful Ghost)), sometimes realistic (Yeonae, haneun nal (연애, 하는 날 A Day of, Love)), or sometimes through science fiction (Gangcheolmujigae (강철무지개 Iron Rainbow)), can be said to reside in the vitriol of general rejection against such a world.
Reference
Wikipedia
https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%B5%9C%EC%9D%B8%EC%84%9D_(1953%EB%85%84)
네이버 한국현대문학사전
http://terms.naver.com/entry.nhn?docId=333979&cid=41708&categoryId=41737
강철무지개 출간 인터뷰, 인터파크 북db, 2015년
http://news.bookdb.co.kr/bdb/Interview.do?_method=InterviewDetail&sc.mreviewNo=59761
한국문화예술위원회 작가정보
http://munjang.or.kr/munjang/author-view.php?au_id=513
